As most of you are no doubt aware, Reddit recently banned the incredibly shitty FatPeopleHate subreddit for harassment. Naturally, members of Reddit’s many other incredibly shitty subreddits — including KotakuInAction, the main GamerGate hangout on Reddit, and of course the Men’s Rights subreddit — are afraid they’ll be next!
“The new age of reddit has begun,” wrote one worried Men’s Rightser. “Admins ban /r/FatPeopleHate (and 4 other subreddits that the admins fail to disclose) for “harassment”. It is only a matter of time before this subreddit gets banned too.”
Meanwhile, in KotakuInAction, a “megathread” about the bans has garnered more than 1100 upvotes and inspired nearly 500 comments.
In that thread, one KiAer has helpfully provided a list of the subreddits Reddit has shut down in recent days. As you can see, most were variants on FatPeopleHate, hastily created in an attempt to get around the ban of the original FatPeopleHate (or just to annoy the site admins); others were offensive in other predictable ways. I’ve highlighted some of the more, er, interesting of the bunch.
My point here?
If you look at a list like the one above and think “oh, no, my favorite subreddit will be next,” then maybe, just maybe, there is something terribly wrong with your favorite subreddit, and probably with you as well.
Men’s Rights: the only self-proclaimed “civil rights” movement outside of literal Nazis that puts itself in the same category as “/r/fatn*ggerhate” and “/r/transf*ggots.”
NOTE TO READERS: My strep throat is better but not gone, and I also have other non-blog things I need to tend to this week, so posting will probably continue to be a bit light.
“First they came for the Nazis, and I did not speak out because I was not a Nazi…”
Then they came for the paedophiles, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a paedophile.
Then they stopped, because with the Nazis and the paedophiles gone the world was a better place, and everyone was happy. We all lived in peace and harmony. The end.
Alpha von Carousel:
On the other hand, I bet you could get a significant number of raving morons to populate /r/ihatehfsplus.
EJ and Judas, you both joke, but there have been Redditors that have seriously posted that poem, with the banned subreddits put in instead of literally nazis.
I can’t understand it… unless they’re completely amoral, they should be able to tell the difference between ousting pretty obviously terrible hate speech and the love child of 1934 and 1984.
… mmiiight have answered my own question there.
I understood Judas to have been trolling, and so I was mocking him. Judas, if you were not trolling, my apologies.
@kirbywarp: Alexander Solzhenitsyn explained it very well to us.
“Had the police not read Marx? Of course they had. When they encountered the word ‘proletariat’ they understood it to mean themselves. When they encountered the word ‘oppressors’ they understood it to mean us, those they arrested. In their minds Marx was urging them on.”
Re: judas-
I hope you’re joking, because using the expression that is literally about the groups of people the Nazis exterminated to try and say that banning nazis is fascist is tone deaf at best, and a fucking atrocity at worst.
(Quoting from memory, so it’s likely to be somewhat off – I’m not going to pull Gulag Archipelago off my shelves and flick through to find the quote. I’m a leeetle bit not sober right now away.)
I’m about 200% sure Judas was making a joke about reddit because nobody would post that in earnest…unless they’re on reddit.
I don’t think I want Reddit as a whole to be shut down (not that anyone has expressed a desire so far, but it has been thought out loud in the past and I’m mostly being hypothetical). It seems to be a site that has nuggets of gold mixed in with putrid shit. Some of the subreddits are great, I find a lot of humour among the posts/comments, and I don’t think I’d want them to go. I just wish someone would overhaul the management and ban/report to authorities the subs that are awful.
@sunny
Or they can make a reddit clone that isn’t completely horrible, one that is properly monitored and shit.
Yeah, that’s all I want with Reddit, really. Just some better monitoring and a refusal to put up with hate speech. : /
Don’t wait for the subreddits to actively start acting on their hatred, just take out the ones that are actively hating on people. Actively.
I assumed Judas was making a joke. I mean, I laughed.
Eh, if so I apologize, but I’ve seen too many duncebags make that exact statement in total earnest for that to be my first impression.
I don’t know about this post, David. I think it’s a little disingenuous to say that they’re ACTUALLY putting themselves in the same category as those subreddits. I’m sure you can tell it’s pretty obvious they’re scared s***less from the word “harassment”. It’s no secret that you literally can’t say just the word “GamerGate” without “harassment” following, at least within a few sentences.
The Men’s Rights subreddit, whatever r/ that is, (I don’t do reddit. Too old for all of that.) is likely scared of the feminist label of who’s implementing the bans. If not just straight up that it’s a woman at all.
It’s paranoia at best, but when have a bunch of shakey internet dwellers been anything more than a step from one “slippery slope” fallacy or another? “Oh, suuuure, it’s going to get rid of some blantantly hate fueled subreddits, but how long until they decide that we’re actually doing harm?”
David: I think it’s sufficient to quote racist and transphobic words and phrases without the odd censorship of asterisks. Using an asterisk to replace a vowel doesn’t do anything except keep the word in our heads rather than seeing it in all its ugliness on the page. It’s like when people, to preserve their own gentility or something, say ‘N-word’ when they’re quoting someone who’s said ‘nigger’, rather than properly quoting that someone’s bigoted speech in its full, original brutality.
I recognize the name. Zie isn’t trolling. It was a joke.
Ugh, I stopped using Reddit ages ago, and my internet experience has improved significantly. The asshole brigades were far too numerous. Sticking to the small subreddits is great until a small subreddit gets even a tiny bit of attention, and then it’s suddenly full of jerks. And the entire site is so inundated with MRA’s and other anti-women types that god help you if you suggest that even blatant sexism is maybe a tiny bit bad.
Off topic, has anyone seen this http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/25177/1/mens-rights-graffiti-spotted-around-london
At first I found it really confusing, because I didn’t realize it was using the Day/Month/Year date format and thought “May 8th already happened”.
Dittoes. I still can’t forget Violentacrez. Trolls aren’t a bug in Reddit, they’re a feature.
I kind of hope the “stress” of losing their thread will make them gain a bunch of weight. Not because there is anything wrong with gaining weight, but because it’s probably at least some of the poster’s worst nightmares.
am I the only one who kinda prefers that assholes have their lil spaces to be assholes in? I dont want to be there, I dont want all spaces to be for the bigots (and that is my problem, too many bigots on FB and twitter and tumblr with too free a reign to be too shitty); but if there is a space like 8chan that is basically for the Shit Lords, I can (a) keep tabs on them if I want, understand the enemy and (b) stay the hell away from them. Reddit shouldnt be that place IMHO, it should be more responsible and mainstream, but I’m not sure my ideal is for it to be impossible for them to publicly display bigotry, a lot of people try to hide it but it is still there…at least if it is spoken aloud good people have the option to refute….(?)
…obviously I dont think harassment and worse should happen at all.
I kind of agree with reddit that as long as there’s no doxxing or criminal activity (posting underage photos) then awful threads should be allowed. Even if gross to me, mocking fat people is same premise as mocking anything that you dislike (eg WHTM) – it’s not reddits place to take a moral position on what people are allowed to dislike (i think, based on what I understand how reddit positions itself). Obviously WHTM/misogyny and reddit/ fat-shaming are totally different in my head, but that’s just cos WHTM aligns with my personal dislikes and I can justify as much as much as I want that my dislikes are legit bad things that should be mocked for the good of society, but I’m pretty sure the fat hate guys justify theirs in the same way. Morality isn’t absolute so no reason why my sense of morality is more valid than fat haters to the extent both are legal.
I definitely haven’t thought this through hugely though but I guess I think social consequences for holding shit views (ie everyone thinks you’re an asshole) is fine but in areas around criminality of hate speech (without incitement) I think it’s dubious and if reddit’s only limit is criminality (I’m speculating) then banning threads for being full of hate doesn’t sit well with me.
Yes but, unlike the fat hate reddits, we don’t make sport out of trying to get people to commit suicide.
Wait, what? There’s a big difference between mocking hateful and illogical ideas and bad writing and mocking an entire demographic of people just for existing.
I’m reminded of my favorite Isaac Asimov quote.
All ideas and all moralities are not equal. We don’t always need to give both sides a platform. Not when it comes to hate.
This thread is about reddit finally starting to police itself a tiny little bit, not criminality. Why would a company voluntarily refusing to give a platform to bigots not sit well with you? What is the argument for giving these people a platform? I can’t think of any.
That said, many Democratic countries have hate speech laws and have managed not to descend into a fascist dystopia. Honestly, I think the US would be better off if we had banned the Confederate flag and memorials celebrating the Confederacy. Germany banned things with Swastikas and Nazi gatherings after WWII and they’re better off for it. As was discussed in one of the other threads here in recent days, Germans are mostly horrified and embarrassed by the Holocaust. It’s not like Nazism has completely died, but nostalgia for the Third Reich doesn’t seem to be mainstream. But, in the American South and even other parts of N. America (I’ve seen the Confederate flag a few times all the way up here in MN) there’s still nostalgia for the Antebellum South. People still claim the Confederate flag is heritage not hate. They still deny that the Confederacy started the war and they still deny that it was primarily about defending the “right” to enslave a race of people. What the fuck is the argument that that should be allowed? Especially in light of Charleston? Hate speech isn’t distasteful or rude. It’s dangerous.
And from what I understand, fat people hate was actually doxxing people. So there’s that.
Holy fuck do I dislike moral relativism. It’s being too lazy to take or justify a position on ethical questions, or being too gutless to tell people you disagree with them, and then disguising this as tolerance.
Just because different people disagree on moral questions does not mean that there is no right answer to moral questions. Some people think the earth is flat, but it’s not. Some people think that people different from themselves are subhuman, but they’re wrong. Some people think harassing fat people is funny and awesome, but it’s not.
There may not be one absolute best and right system of morality such that we can have a clear answer for every question, but somethings are clearly bad.